713 



WILLIAM I. (OF ENGLAND). 



WILLIAM I. (OF ENGLAND). 



714 



which had been decided on the field of Hastings ; in fact it was now, 

 in 1068 and 1069, and not in 1066, that the subjugation of the country 

 was really effected, and the Norman dominion established. At first 

 the enemy seemed to be everywhere nor were the insurgent natives 

 the only power that threatened to dispute with William the possession 

 of the country. His first movement was agaiust the city of Exeter, 

 the head-quarters of the south-western insurrection ; but with all his 

 vigour, it was not till after a siege of eighteen days that he forced 

 his way into the place, and even then he engaged that the inhabitants 

 should not be injured either in their lives, their properties, or their 

 municipal privileges. In this quarter of the kingdom, as yet at least, 

 the revolt scarcely seems to have been a Saxon or national movement; 

 it might have grown to that, but at present it was apparently little 

 more than a resistance to some oppressive proceedings, or apprehended 

 proceedings, of the established authorities. William was satisfied 

 therefore with merely putting down the dangerous example, perhaps 

 even at the cost of some concession or compromise ; it was necessary 

 that he should not leave such a flame behind him to gather strength 

 while he should be engaged with the more formidable rebellion in the 

 north. That occupied him with little intermission for the whole of 

 the next and a great part of the succeeding year. At the head of it, 

 when it had broken out, were the two earls Edwin and Morcar; 

 they were fallen upon and compelled to make their, submission ; and 

 for a time the attempt seemed to be crushed. A second rising was as 

 speedily put down ; but in the course of the succeeding summer of 1069, 

 first the three surviving sous of Harold lauded at Plymouth from 

 Ireland, in June, with a fleet of sixty-four sail, and theu, in July, 

 Canute the son of Sveno, the Danish king, appeared on the eastern 

 coast at the head of a much more formidable armament : the Irish 

 invaders were driven back after having plundered the adjacent country ; 

 the Danes were joined by the newly quieted inhabitants of Yorkshire 

 and Northumberland (themselves mostly of Danish lineage), and a 

 final struggle ensued, which did not indeed last long, and in which 

 William came off victorious, but which left that part of his kingdom 

 literally a desolate wildei-ness ; for, after he had subdued all armed 

 resistance, he found no other way which promised to be effectual in 

 preventing a new insurrection, except actually to depopulate the 

 country by fire and sword, and to reduce a large tract of it to the soli- 

 tude and silence of death. It is affirmed that above a hundred thousand 

 men, women, and children were destroyed in this terrible operation, 

 and that for nine years thereafter not a patch of tillage was to be seen 

 between York and Durham ; nor were the ruins of the buildings that 

 had been thrown down in the reckless devastation cleared away for 

 more than a century. 



From this time William ruled his kingdom like a true conqueror. 

 The natives of the country were rapidly deprived of everything, and 

 reduced to a state of complete slavery. All the offices both in the 

 church and the state, from the highest to the lowest, were, with 

 scarcely an exception, filled with Normans and other foreigners. On 

 any pretence or no pretence at all, by confiscations and unjust decrees, 

 by force or by fraud, nearly every Englishman was in the course of a 

 few years ejected from all proprietorship of the soil, which was not 

 merely, according to the principle of the feudal system, treated as 

 derived from and held of the crown, but was actually seized by the 

 crown, and either retained by it or redistributed at its pleasure. In 

 other respects also feudalism was carried out with a rigour and to an 

 excess that had nowhere else been exemplified. The people were 

 ground to the earth by various new and oppressive imposts. Fortresses 

 were erected and garrisoned in all the considerable towns to overawe 

 the inhabitants. In short the country was reduced to a vast encamp- 

 ment, in which the only freedom, public or private, that was left was 

 the right of a small number of insolent masters to tyrannise at will 

 over a multitude of toiling and helpless bondsmen. 



All this however, and the deluge of blood in which the northern 

 rebellion had been quenched, had the full effect that was intended, of 

 breaking the spirit of the nation, and hushing for the future the very 

 Bound of resistance. The only further trouble that William had with 

 the native English was in putting down a band of outlaws, who, 

 headed by the intrepid and skilful Saxon Hereward, for a short tinre 

 set his power at defiance amid the fens and morasses of the Isle of 

 Ely; and they were rooted out in the course of the year 1071. In 

 1072 the Conqueror, all England being reduced to submission, found 

 himself at leisure to lead a great army across the northern border to 

 chastise the Scottish king Malcolm Canmore, who, besides having 

 received and protected Edgar Atheling, whose sister he had married, 

 had two years before, immediately after the suppression of the 

 Worth umbrian insurrection, made an inroad into the western parts of 

 York and Durham, and spread almost as much devastation in that 

 quarter as the vengeance of the English king had done along the 

 eastern coast. Aa William advanced, the inhabitants not only fled 

 before him, but, setting fire to their farm-houses and villages, and 

 carrying away with them everything of value which the flames did not 

 consume, left the land a bare and silent desert. He continued his 

 unresisted march however as far as the Tay, and there, at Abernethy, 

 Malcolm met him, and made his submission, which, according to the 

 English chroniclers, went the length of swearing fealty to him for the 

 kingdom of Scotland, but most probably amounted only to an acknow- 

 ledgment of him as king of England by the performance of homage for 



Cumberland and the other English possessions annexed to the Scottish 

 crown. Malcolm moreover is stated to have given hostages for his 

 observance of the peace thus concluded ; but no friendship was 

 established between the two ; the Scottish king continued to adhere 

 to the cause of his brother-in-law, and a few years after this, in 1079, 

 seizing bis opportunity while William was in Normandy, he again 

 crossed the border, and carried fire and sword into Northumberland as 

 far as the Tyne. In the autumn of the following year William sent an 

 army into Scotland under the command of his son Robert ; but after 

 advancing only a few miles (to a place which Simeon of Durham calls 

 Eglesbreth), it returned without having effected anything. It was 

 soon after this that the fortress of Newcastle was erected on the 

 Tyne, with the view of checking these Scottish inroads. 



Meanwhile, in 1075, during another visit of William to his con- 

 tinental dominions, a number of his Anglo-Norman barons, with 

 Roger, the son of William Fitz-Osbern, and his successor in the earl- 

 dom of Hereford, at their head, offended, as they professed, at his gene- 

 rally haughty bearing and oppressive government, but chiefly moved, it 

 is probable, by dissatisfaction at the lion's share he had taken to him- 

 self in the fruits of their common conquest, had entered into a con- 

 federacy to drive him from the throne. But their conspiracy being 

 detected, they were hurried into an armed rising before their plans 

 were mature, and their forces were dispersed by the grand justiciaries 

 William de Warrenne and Richard de Bienfait, in a battle fought at a 

 place called, by Or lericus Vitalis, Fagaduna, by which is supposed to be 

 meant Beecham, or Bicham, in Norfolk. On his return home William, 

 the Saxon chronicler states, led a powerful army into Wales, and 

 established his dominion over that country. 



The next and only other attempt which was made in William's life- 

 time to shake his throne, though it wore at first a formidable aspect, 

 came also to nothing, as all the rest had done, defeated partly by his 

 vigilance, promptitude, and energy, partly, as one would say, by his 

 good fortune. In 1085 Canute, the son of Sveno, who had now suc- 

 ceeded his father as king of Denmark, put himself at the head of a 

 great naval armament with the avowed design of asserting his heredi- 

 tary claim to the English crown. William immediately collected a 

 great army to oppose him, by bringing over multitudes of mercenaries 

 from every pait of the continent; but the matter never came to the 

 arbitrement of the sword : the sagacious English king is supposed to 

 have employed his treasure in corrupting the forces of his enemy, as 

 well as in hiring mercenaries for his own defence ; be that as it 

 may, oue cause or another always prevented Canute from putting to 

 sea ; at last, after he had lain for more than a year in the port of 

 Haithaby, or Haddeby (on the right bank of the Schle, opposite to 

 Schleswig), a mutiny broke out in the fleet, and the enterprise was 

 abandoned. It was to help, him to meet this danger that William 

 revived the odious tax called the Danegelt. 



Shortly after his conquest of England, William had promised to hia 

 eldest son Robert his hereditary duchy, but afterwards refused to 

 resign it. This led to a contest of arms, in which the father and son 

 are said to have on one occasion encountered without knowing one 

 another, when the old king was wounded in the hand in the unnatural 

 combat. This was while William was besieging the castle of Gerberoi, 

 into which his son had thrown himself. They were eventually recon- 

 ciled by the intercession of Queen Matilda. It was another quarrel 

 about N ormandy however with Philip I. of France, who had taken the 

 part of Robert, that cost William his life. In the summer of 1087 a 

 sarcasm of Philip's on the corpulency of his brother of England, who 

 was then confined to his bed by illness at Rouen (lying-in, as Philip 

 phrased it), infuriated the proud Norman; he swore that at his 

 churching he would set all France in a blaze : as soon as he was able 

 to be on horseback, he collected an army, and made a dash at the city 

 of Mante, formerly belonging to Normandy, which he took, and imme- 

 diately ordered to be eet on fire. This was on the 10th of August. 

 He was enjoying the sight of the conflagration, in which many of the 

 inhabitants perished, when his horse stumbled on some hot embers, 

 and threw him forward on the pommel of the saddle, by which he was 

 so much injured that, being carried back to Rouen, he never again left 

 his bed, but died there on the morning of the 9th of September 

 following, in the fifty-ninth year of his age and twenty-first of his 

 reign. 



The principal portion of the laws of the Conqueror that has come 

 down to us consists of a capitulary, which is said to have been drawn 

 up and agreed upon in an assembly of the principal persons of the 

 realm, whom he called together about the year 1070. It is for the 

 most part a selection of the laws previously in force in the Saxon 

 times, according to the last general revision by Canute the Great. It 

 exists both in Latin and in Romance, or old French ; and the Latin 

 version, which is preserved in the history attributed to Ingulphus. has 

 usually been reckoned the original; but Sir Francis Palgrave, who 

 has printed both versions from better manuscripts than had been 

 before employed, in his ' Rise and Progress of the English Common- 

 wealth,' Proofs and Illustrations, Ixxxviii.-civ., has advanced some 

 reasons for believing that these laws of the Conqueror were most 

 probably originally written in Latin, which was the language in which 

 legal documents were commonly drawn up in England for some ages 

 after this date. The common statement that William attempted to 

 abolish the English tongue and to substitute the French, whether in 



